Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Thanks to the History Channel, we now have another reason to watch the films Escape from Alcatraz and Dark Passage once again. A recent re-examination of the history of Alcatraz suggests once again that three men escaped the island.
According to the website (and iphone app) Alcatraz History, John and Clarence Anglin and Frank Lee Morris are the only names left unaccounted for after all these years. Clint Eastwood played Morris in the film Escape from Alcatraz, so it was through his eyes that we got to explore the challenges of digging tunnels with spoons and creating fake dummy heads from prison wall cement.
At the 50th anniversary of their “escape,” sisters of John and Clarence Anglin asserted that they must have escaped, say, to Brazil, for why else would the U.S. Marshalls and the History Channel still be looking for them?
Meanwhile, Bogart’s escape from San Quentin in the beginning of Dark Passage is intriguing for a couple reasons. One, it takes place not far from here on Marin County and San Francisco streets that we may have driven ourselves. Secondly, Bogart’s face is not shown in the beginning of the film, with many scenes shot from his point of view. There is a plastic surgery twist that I think you will enjoy.
As a poet, and as someone who has taken and taught film theory classes, I read such movies metaphorically. What prisons do each of us live in, and how do we escape them? William Blake asserted in his poem “London” that we establish needless limitations in our own minds:
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
T.S. Eliot spoke of a similar mental prison in The Waste Land:
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.
While Thoreau argues that our desperation imprisons us:
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
He argues in that same section of Walden that “Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”
So I hope you that tonight you will break free from the prison of television, or of thoughtless and glassy-eyed surfing, and instead join your friends and me as we pick from life’s finer fruits.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on doctors with borders, aggressive plants, Shakespeare movies, sporting villains, the dreams that we have the courage to pursue, contracts, book battles, novels by women, scientific notebooks, cornfields, little furry creatures that almost kill franchises, growth leaders, walking dumplings, the guy who gets the girl, famous characters invented by Irishmen, poor little angels, freedoms of choice, days of the week, long Wigs, Boston University faculty, urban neurotics, 8th passengers, breath jells, South America, shot deputies, retail warehouses, banalities, the undead, famous mansions, the studies of Professor Plum, people born in the 1970s, extra hints on the website, riveters, Grammy-winners, famous shoes, Batman, Dark Passages (the actual movie), mermaids, and Shakespeare.
The First Annual Battle of the Books takes place this Thursday, and four of the authors represented are frequent (or constant) Pub Quiz attendees. Maybe I will see you Thursday night at 6 at St James Hall. Even though it’s Thursday, there will be no Poetry Night that night. Join us instead for the BOTB fundraiser for the Hattie Weber Museum.
See you soon!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. What sort of breakfast cereal, if you can call it that, purports to be “magically delicious”?
- Internet Culture. Presented just last week, the twelfth major release of OS X was named after a large two-word rock formation that begins with the letter E. Name it.
- Newspaper Headlines. South Carolina is being battered by a series of serious storms, and parts of the capital are still being evacuated. What is the capital of South Carolina?
- Four for Four. Which two of the following species of oak are native to California? Cork Oak, Engelmann Oak, Scarlet Oak, Valley Oak.
- Find the Commonality. What word that refers to a robot and an operating system is also the name of a Green Day song and a 1982 science fiction film starring Klaus Kinski?
P.S. I have been assured that the mic will be working this evening.